11/22/63: A Novel

11/22/63: A Novel

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTSRANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENTKENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED.WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE IT BACK? In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen Kingwho has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writertakes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it. It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him awaya gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his lifelike Harry's, like America's in 1963turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsessionto prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there's Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.
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Cruelty

Cruelty

Roald Dahl

Children's Books / Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected book of his darkest stories.'Cruelty has a human heart . . .'Even when we mean to be kind we can sometimes be cruel. We each have a streak of nastiness inside us. In these ten tales of cruelty master storyteller Roald Dahl explores how and why it is we make others suffer.Among others, you'll read the story of two young bullies and the boy they torment, the adulterous wife who uncovers her husband's secret, the man with a painting tattooed on his back whose value he doesn't appreciate and the butler and chef who run rings around their obnoxious employer.Dahl understood our deepest secrets, desires and fears and Cruelty is one of four books - the rest being Lust, Deception and Madness - that explore our hidden selves.
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The Velvet Hours

The Velvet Hours

Alyson Richman

Historical Fiction / Literature & Fiction

From the international bestselling author of The Lost Wife and The Garden of Letters, comes a story—inspired by true events—of two women pursuing freedom and independence in Paris during WWII.As Paris teeters on the edge of the German occupation, a young French woman closes the door to her late grandmother's treasure-filled apartment, unsure if she'll ever return. An elusive courtesan, Marthe de Florian cultivated a life of art and beauty, casting out all recollections of her impoverished childhood in the dark alleys of Montmartre. With Europe on the brink of war, she shares her story with her granddaughter Solange Beaugiron, using her prized possessions to reveal her innermost secrets. Most striking of all are a beautiful string of pearls and a magnificent portrait of Marthe painted by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini. As Marthe's tale unfolds, like velvet itself, stitched with its own shadow and light, it helps to guide Solange...
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Expecting Miracle Twins

Expecting Miracle Twins

Barbara Hannay

Romance / Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

SUMMARY: After agreeing to be a surrogate mother for her best friends, Mattie Carey can't wait to give them the biggest gift of all. She's put aside her dreams of finding Mr. Right and has set her mind on her new role.Moving to Sydney, the last person Mattie expects to meet is her perfect man. Jake Devlin, her temporary flatmate, is cheeky, charming, intriguing… But it's so not the right time for Mattie to fall in love….
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Vixen 03 dp-5

Vixen 03 dp-5

Clive Cussler

Literature & Fiction / Adventure / Nonfiction

1954. Vixen 03 is down. The plane, bound for the Pacific carrying thirty-six Doomsday bombs — canisters armed with quick-death germs of unbelievable potency ― vanishes. Vixen has in fact crashed into an ice-covered lake in Colorado. 1988. Dirk Pitt, who heroically raised the Titanic , discovers the wreckage of  Vixen 03 . But two deadly canisters are missing. They're in the hands of a terrorist group. Their lethal mission: to sail a battleship seventy-five miles up the Potomac and blast Washington, D.C., to kingdom come. Only Dirk can stop them.
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The Devils of Loudun

The Devils of Loudun

Aldous Huxley

Literature & Fiction / Poetry / Nonfiction

Aldous Huxley's acclaimed and gripping account of one of the strangest occurrences in historyIn 1643 an entire convent in the small French village of Loudun was apparently possessed by the devil. After a sensational and celebrated trial, the convent's charismatic priest Urban Grandier—accused of spiritually and sexually seducing the nuns in his charge—was convicted of being in league with Satan. Then he was burned at the stake for witchcraft. In this classic work by the legendary Aldous Huxley—a remarkable true story of religious and sexual obsession considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece—a compelling historical event is clarified and brought to vivid life.Review"Huxley has reconstructed with skill, learning and horror one of the most appalling incidents in the history of witch-hunting during its seventeenth-century heyday. The Devils of Loudun is fascinating, erudite, and instinct with intellectual vitality" Times Literary Supplement "Huxley's analysis of motive, his exposition of the unconscious causes of behaviour, his exposure of the perversions to which religious emotion is subject, his discursions on the witch cult, on mass hysteria, on sexual eccentricity have the brilliance that all his writing has had from the very beginning" Spectator "One of Huxley's best books" Guardian "His masterpiece, and perhaps the most enjoyable book about spirituality ever written. In telling the grotesque, bawdy and true story of a 17th-century convent of cloistered French nuns who contrived to have a priest they never met burned alive ...Huxley painlessly conveys a wealth of information about mysticism and the unconscious" Washington Post About the AuthorAldous Huxley (1894-1963) is the author of the classic novels Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Devils of Loudun, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles.
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The Bighead

The Bighead

Edward Lee

Horror / Literature & Fiction / Mystery & Thrillers

Who is he? What is he? An inbred homicidal pervert? A supernatural psychopath? Who or whatever he is, he's on a roll now, raging out of the Virginia backwoods and leaving in his wake a trail of blood, guts, and disgust far beyond the limits of your reckoning. Never before has a work of fiction dared to delve so deeply into the realms of perversion, sexual dementia, and bad taste.
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The Book of the New Sun [03] Sword and Citadel

The Book of the New Sun [03] Sword and Citadel

Gene Wolfe

Literature & Fiction / Science Fiction & Fantasy

The Book of the New Sun is unanimously acclaimed as Gene Wolfe's most remarkable work, hailed as "a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis" by Publishers Weekly, and "one of the most ambitious works of speculative fiction in the twentieth century" by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Sword & Citadel brings together the final two books of the tetralogy in one volume:The Sword of the Lictor is the third volume in Wolfe's remarkable epic, chronicling the odyssey of the wandering pilgrim called Severian, driven by a powerful and unfathomable destiny, as he carries out a dark mission far from his home.The Citadel of the Autarch brings The Book of the New Sun to its harrowing conclusion, as Severian clashes in a final reckoning with the dread Autarch, fulfilling an ancient prophecy that will forever alter the realm known as Urth."Brilliant . . . terrific . . . a fantasy so epic it beggars the mind. An extraordinary work of art!"-Philadelphia Inquirer"The Book of the New Sun establishes [Wolfe's] preeminence, pure and simple. . . . The Book of the New Sun contains elements of Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness and Wagnerian mythology. Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within . . . once into it, there is no stopping."--The New York Times Book ReviewReview"Outstanding...A major work of twentieth-century American literature." --The New York Times Book Review"Wonderfully vivid and inventive...the most extraordinary hero in the history of the heroic epic." --Washington Post Book World"Brilliant...terrific...a fantasy so epic it beggars the mind. An extraordinary work of art!" --Philadelphia InquirerAbout the AuthorGene Wolfe has been called "the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced" by The Washington Post. A former engineer, he has written numerous books and won a variety of awards for his SF writing.
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Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down

Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down

Clive Cussler

Literature & Fiction / Adventure / Nonfiction

SUMMARY: When some of the top thriller writers in the world came together in Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, they became part of one of the most successful short-story anthologies ever published. The highly anticipated Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down is even bigger. Edited by the grand master of adventure, Clive Cussler, Thriller 2 is packed with over 20 all-new stories from some of the biggest names in fiction. From Jeffery Deaver's tale of international terrorism to Ridley Pearson's horrifying serial killer, this collection has something for all crime and thriller fans to enjoy.
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Dark Star

Dark Star

Alan Dean Foster

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Literature & Fiction / Horror

ALL SYSTEMS SNAFU!!!If anything could go wrong aboard the scoutship Dark Star, sooner or later it would. Now in the 20th year of their mission—destroying unstable planets—the ship and its crew were falling apart . . .After 20 years in space, isolation and loneliness have left their mark. The four surviving crew members are bored beyond relief. Only an occasional bomb run or another or the inevitable malfunctions aboard ship upsets the monotony.Then, Bomb #20 is primed, armed, and set to detonate—suddenly life on the Dark Star becomes frantic . . .
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His Inherited Wife

His Inherited Wife

Barbara McMahon

Romance / Literature & Fiction

Inheriting half of her late husband's company means Shannon Morris is now Jase Pembrooke's business partner--to their mutual dismay!Working together, they are forced to confront their growing attraction. Then Shannon discovers that Jase promised her late husband he'd take care of her. Shannon doesn't want a relationship based on obligation. If she were to marry again, it would only be for love. But can Jase convince her that he isn't acting purely out of duty?
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